Any of you grow out of your suicidal thoughts?
As the title states.
I'm growing tired of dealing with suicidal thoughts that have been plaguing my existence. It's just very tiresome and I am starting to understand why some people go through with it. It's getting to the point where I'm starting to think that since we all eventually die, then why not take control of the situation and do it yourself.
Just another first world problem.
I'm growing tired of dealing with suicidal thoughts that have been plaguing my existence. It's just very tiresome and I am starting to understand why some people go through with it. It's getting to the point where I'm starting to think that since we all eventually die, then why not take control of the situation and do it yourself.
Just another first world problem.
Comments (58)
Some problems get worse with age because there are neurological costs to mental illness and treatment. For instance, severe bi-polar disorder, epilepsy, or schizophrenia can cause physical damage to the brain, and the medications that help control these disorders have side effects. A 40 or 50 year history of mental illness (or serious epilepsy) often leaves people with decreased emotional and cognitive functioning.
Some problems don't change much with age, because people keep doing the same things over and over again and keep getting the same results. There are... hundreds of millions in this boat.
Some people do commit suicide, that's true. My guess is that the usual cause is NOT that people get tired of dealing with the suicidal thinking. Something precipitates a surge in despair, like losing a mate, losing a job, chronic illness that gets worse... that sort of thing.
If you have been thinking about suicide for a long time, you might very well keep thinking about it into old age and die of heart disease, cancer, or stroke. It would probably help the quality of your life if you generated more positive thinking about your life.
While that sort of advice (think positively) is cheap and easy to hand out, I'm still billing you $100 for this brief therapeutic post.
It's like smoking. It's killing but sufficiently concealed under piles of profit money that we don't realize it. Even if we do realize it, there's little we can do about it.
Quoting TheMadFool
Yeah true, I agree with that. But there's always something that stops the killing too, like hope, or fear, too.
If you're really depressed, being on the right medication can be a good tool to get you to a place where you feel motivated enough to start the work you'll need to do to get better - therapy, exercise, proper sleep, balanced diet, healthy relationships.
Even now that I'm in a pretty decent place, being tired from lack of sleep can bring back a feeling resembling mild depression, and the negative thinking tries to fight its way back in. Stressful situations have the same sort of effect on me.
As for suicidal thoughts, they are usually a part of the hamster wheel of depressed thinking when I'm tired or stressed, but they carry a lot less power. In my case, I'm not sure if they will ever go away completely, because I had two nearly fatal suicide attempts.
For me one attempt was precipitated by a major crisis during an extended period of severe depression. The other occurred after a night of binge drinking, during a very stressful period in my life. My depression was fairly well controlled by medication at the time, but I think the meds were masking a lot of the stressors.
Feel free to private message me - I have a fair bit of experience with depression, recovery, and relapse, and may be able to offer some sound advice if I know more about your situation. (Although I like to keep everything in the open, in the hopes that it will help someone else.)
I understand, but it's not like I like being depressed. I remember waking up in my youth and being interested in the world or doing some things. Now, I wake up and just wait until I can go to sleep again. I am already in therapy; but, I suppose I am having high expectations or something as I don't feel as though it is helping me.
My point is that the thoughts keep on returning and the hope that CBT might solve the thoughts did not come through. It's depressing that one has to live in a fortress and always be under siege by the negative thoughts.
So, do you at least develop some tolerance to those thoughts? Becuase, it really is a burden as people say.
I know that feeling. I'm currently trying to get out of that place as well. I keep telling myself I need to be more disciplined in my life, but then that's just another example of being hard on myself...
Being disciplined does give you a certain capacity to be "bullet-proof" though. It's good, in the sense that you don't feel bad about yourself.
I think we have different personalities. That's not to say that I can't change myself and be more disciplined, but personality is an amalgamation of everything we've experienced and been through in life. So, discipline has been a major part of your life, it sounds like, whereas I've figured out how to be "smart" about it and just barely get by without much discipline, if that makes sense. But if there's a good side to it, it's that I'm open to spontaneity, and I think my creativity is higher than most people. That could be related to lack of discipline, although I've gone through creative periods in which I was very disciplined about my creativity, but not much else. But I was just talking about general discipline in life; indulging in vices too much, not getting things done in a timely manner, general selfishness...but I can't respond to this negatively and say to myself "you're so undisciplined, come on, get it together!" Because that's just one more negative thought about myself. I have to find a way to positively want more discipline, to want self-flourishing and health.
Well, as an undisciplined person, I also feel an absence of joy. :P So maybe joy is about something else.
The issue doesn't seem to be related to discipline in my opinion. It's just a matter of repressed feelings from my understanding.
I think the Buddhist teaching of the impermanence of emotions is worth bringing up. However, if these thoughts are reoccurring, then I don't know what would help. Therapy takes time and often when one thinks things are getting better, the depression or suicidal thoughts return with a vengeance.
Is this a no win situation? That's what I'm feeling as of recently. Maybe I need to have more hope; but, it seems Sisyphean to be optimistic when those feelings return.
Sometimes I have good days, and then there are bad days. I just feel depressed about feeling depressed. It's a self-defeating attitude and hard to cope with.
I've made it this far but I wonder if I wouldn't benefit from some sort of medication.
I think that if you see suicide as a good thing, at least in some cases, it can help make it less of a scary thing to think about. Sometimes death is precisely what is needed to solve a problem. Also remember that most suicide attempts are failures, I think the statistic for adults is like 1 in 25 attempts are successful, and for younger people it's something like 1 in 200 or 300 or something ridiculous like that. Part of what makes suicide so tempting is how easy it seems to be to do, like you take a gun and pop yourself in the head, or chug a bottle of pills, no big deal or anything. But apparently it's a lot harder to kill yourself than your imagination makes it seem.
That being said I think if we lacked psychological repression techniques and were perfectly rational beings we would probably all be lining up for euthanasia.
The thing about medication, and if you don't 'need' it, then better live without it than become dependant on it. I might see if I can switch around some of the stuff I am taking and see if some newer medication might help.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yeah, I think that is true. I've heard hereabouts that depression is also a form of behavior that other animals feel also. Some birds will drown themselves if they lose a partner and primates also have behaviors similar to depression when confronted with duress.
Sure but it's probably better than self-medicating with alcohol or some kind of substance.
I agree, keeping it natural is still the best of all evils
And if suicide has become a topic that is as normal for you to think about as, "what am I going to eat for breakfast?" then you have to work toward making suicide a more outlying, rare thing to think about. Walruses. I dunno why, but I just thought of walruses. Do I think about walruses all day, every day? No. Would it be silly for me to contemplate walruses all day, every day? Yes. So, if I was thinking about walruses all the time, I'd stop and try and figure out why the fuck I was thinking about walruses so much. If I then discover that I've been watching nature documentaries about walruses, was reading a book about someone surviving a walrus attack, putting up walrus wallpaper in my house...then it'll become quite clear why I've been contemplating walruses so intensely and what I should do in order to stop thinking about walruses so much.
Question is, Question, do you really want to stop thinking about suicide/walruses? You first have to be willing to dispel such thoughts in the first place before you know whether or not you are able to get rid of them.
What you're really asking me to do is to repress the suicide thoughts. I can't repress them anymore. They're leaking out of me and causing me distress.
Quoting Question
In other words, find the holes which leak, and figure out whether those holes can be plugged by yourself, or if you need help.
I can't find an origin. It seems like something biological to me. I'm still confused about the origin of my depression and subsequent suicidal thoughts.
I'm pretty sure it has to do with more than one thing, but I have no idea what each and individual factor is. I know that there are biological roots, but apart from that no idea. I did have a mental breakdown when I was 17. I thought the worse was over but seemingly that is not the case.
It may be that you haven't found the right therapist. I know I went through a couple of duds before I found one that was helpful.
It might also be that you're not on the right medication. I've been through many drug combos, and I'm finally on what seems to be the right mix. Thankfully, it's a mix that doesn't have any obvious side effects, so I'm not too motivated to try and get off of them.
Another thing that seems to be helping is something called repetitive trans-cranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). If they offer it where you live, I would recommend giving it a shot. It can be expensive though, and typically isn't covered by medical benefits. Where I live, it's close to being covered by the government health plan.
CBT will help with the conscious part of your problem - catching the negative self-talk that keeps popping up, refuting it, and replacing it with rational thought. It won't help with the poison that may be brewing underneath.
With a proper therapist, you should be able to drill down to the stuff that's tucked away in the sub-conscious. I think you need to dig up all the crap from the past in order to fully heal and move on in a healthy way.
(Y)
This can also take months to years in order to achieve.
Perhaps, but the negative effects of cock and ball torture often outweigh the positives, so do be careful.
Decisions under duress aren't free. Yes, suicide is a personal decision, but, it's forced upon you. In a sense, it's the perfect murderer's MO (modus operandi). Isn't that why, in law, we have to investigate suicides? We look for foul play, both direct (murder being made to look like suicide) and indirect (inciting someone to suicide).
And, that's the issue I'm dealing with. I've studied CBT for a good six or seven years. It doesn't work for the root cause of the distressing thoughts.
Sadly, the issue feels that it needs to be addressed soon. I'll probably talk with my doctor to change my medication and see if I can register for a meeting with a therapist. Problem is, I've been to a multitude of therapists and I don't feel as though we've made any progress in terms of uncovering why the depression is there in the first place.
It's still a decision, you can't take away the choice that one makes in their decision-making process.
The point of coercion is to rob someone of choice. I've been forced to do things and I certainly didn't feel like I had a choice.
Either X or suicide
Not X (by force or threat)
Therefore, suicide
Does the above look like choice?
Fine, have it your way. You're robbing yourself of your future (be it a depressed and unhappy one) by committing suicide.
:D
I'm not suicidal, unfortunately. I'm not saying we should opt suicide. What is important to to know is the average Joe doesn't commit suicide (choice) and at the other end of the spectrum we have suicide (choice). The difference is that the the former's choice is free while the latter's isn't. This must surely mean something, right?
There is really no choice for the stupid. The stupid shall suffer either way.
I know of two types of suicide, one's done out of passion and the other done analytically and with a plan. Both give the same result; but, it's the one done in cold rationality that bears the mark of making a self-determined choice.
[I]Cold rationality??[/i]. Give me some examples. Suicide is rationalonly to the extent that we choose through a disjunctive syllogism:
1) Either A or suicide
2) Not A (not acceptable option)
Therefore,
3) Suicide
And I think, premise 1 is false most of the time. In extremis, we may take desperate steps but that's the whole point, in extremis.
Suicide is much more complex than a disjunctive syllogism. I don't think we need to trivialize the issue here with a simple modus ponens.
And, yes, though I'm not playing devils, advocate, here, suicide can be rational in some cases. In others, I don't see the argument from the sanctity of life as a viable alternative.
Again, if we're going to die either way, then one can choose when and how they want to die. The only cases where suicide is unethical is when leaving a burden on others behind with one's passing. Even in those cases, there are exceptions to the rule where suffering is greater than the continuation of life for others, and this suicide becomes morally and ethically neutral.
Is suicide selfish? Yes, in a way it is selfish; however, I don't think we've evolved to the point of being concerned for the welfare and lives of others to such an extent that suicide would appear morally wrong. If I were Mozart of some sort or gifted in some other regards and had something to contribute to society, then I would put more hesitation on the thought of killing myself. But, Mozart I am not nor a Bach for the matter.
Maybe you do have something to contribute to society, but you'll never know it unless you try it with your whole being. Contributing something to society isn't easy. Mozart had to work very hard for it. Most of the people are too lazy to work as hard as it takes though - so they prefer to have an easier life and be enlightened hedonists.
I'm afraid it is not. The final stage of reasoning is exactly a disjunctive syllogism. It's rational, agreed, but only in a mechanical robotic sense. The reasoning prior to it is what's important (I think that's what you mean) and that I can say, all Buddhists say, is erroneous. There are exceptions to this view, but that's a vacuous truth because every rule has exceptions.
Quoting Question
Sanctity has nothing to do with it. Suffering, the much touted reason to peddle suicide as an option, is irrational. It's simply foolishness and dangerous to ask for the impossible - life can't be a bed of roses. So, accept facts e.g. the Buddhist tenet of impermanence, if you accept it, drastically reduces suffering, or so I hear.
Quoting Question
Well, yes, it's true choice exists at every point along the way to almost anything. However, the circumstances surrounding these choices are very different for a suicidal person. It's coercion, subtle and almost imperceptible, and most don't see it. I think your sense of choice (in suicide) is so broad that in such a world the possibility of there being situations where we don't have choice is zero. That I think isn't good because, to say the least, it ignores the complexity of human nature and behavior.
Quoting Question
Suicide is not morally wrong. It's irrational (most of the time).
Debatable...
Quoting Agustino
What is "your whole being"? Why does contribution require this? You've acknowledged that your focus on discipline and hard work has led to a lack of "joy" in life.
Quoting Agustino
What do you base this view off of? your own view of your own work as being above the work of those hedonists who don't work hard enough? If not, then how exactly do you predicate this admonishment on "the people"? (Forgive me Aug, I have to try to pick you apart about once every quarter here, at least >:O )
This would be a very misleading statement. I said I sometimes experience lack of joy, but I wouldn't give up discipline and hard work for other things, because they do ensure me with a few things which, while not sufficient for happiness, are necessary (or if they're not necessary, they give you a self-esteem boost). For example money, free time, fitness, continuous learning, learning new skills, etc. It's one thing to look in the mirror and be like "Who's that fatty?!" and another to look in the mirror and feel strong and capable inside your body. It's one thing to be worried that you may get sick or ill because of the crap you're eating, compared to feeling proud that you're on a healthy diet!
As for why I sometimes experience lack of joy, I'd guess it's that I don't have sufficient people around who share my personality, so most people I know are either business partners, acquaintances (such as from school, neighbours, etc.), or relatives, and I pretty much don't enjoy spending my time with any of them.
Quoting Noble Dust
Your whole being means to do it with your whole energy. Really do it. Don't kid yourself about doing it. Don't put in half effort. Give it your everything. As for why contribution requires this - well because contribution is very very difficult. If it was easy, everyone would do it. But most people don't, at least not in a big way.
Quoting Noble Dust
On my own experience of other people :P
Quoting Noble Dust
I don't think my "own work" is above their work, it's just MORE work.
No misleading intended. So, if the difference is between "sometimes" and "always", as it seems to be in your distinction here, then yes, if that's what you stipulated initially, then of course I'll acknowledge that. I of course never intended to mislead. I shouldn't need to mention that to you personally.
Quoting Agustino
Worthwhile thoughts, but I don't think you specifically said that in the referenced context.
Quoting Agustino
What are your secrets/???
Quoting Agustino
>:O While I can absolutely identify with this...maybe our type should do a better job of learning to identify with the basic level of humanity? Basic not in a moral or ethical sense, but just in the sense of philosophical depth (a sense of depth that I don't, by the way, assign to any level of intellectual ability)?
Right, I've seen this trend with you. In the best, softest way (or wait; maybe I should say it in the most violent way with you???), I think this is absolutely a problem of yours. You have a Jesus Christ Complex.
Mind you, I see it in you because I also see it in me. Try to be level-headed about this...
Quoting Agustino
Quoting Noble Dust
Don't eat crap! >:O It's difficult to stipulate "how" I do it, especially now, as I actually don't have to "try" to resist any urges, as I just don't have them anymore. But you have to eliminate bad foods one by one. Say you won't drink anymore coke. So don't drink that (I never drink coke for example), but keep the rest of the junk you eat. Then when you get over that, remove something else, and so on.
Quoting Noble Dust
Okay, how do you propose we do that without getting bored, and feeling unfulfilled? :P
Quoting Noble Dust
I don't understand why you're tip-toeing around what you're trying to say >:O You can speak straight.
It's interesting what you say, but what use is putting those labels on ourselves? Oh, he has generalised anxiety disorder - oh I have a messiah complex - oh etc. It's just a label, it prevents us from seeing the person underneath the label - it makes everyone so labeled identical, and they're not.
I wouldn't say I have a Messiah complex - but I do like being the underdog and beating the odds. Not so much about "saving" others (although it can ALSO be about that), but more about being able to beat the odds - ie do something difficult.
True that it shouldn't make people identical, but it's also true that the states of mind those labels represent are a part of the identify of those people.
My point is that the states of mind are more varied and more detailed than the label permits. Thus the label is always inaccurate.
I think inaccurate is too strong; the label might generalize, but it does so based on shared characteristics.
What I'm trying to say is really that generalizing is impossible or not helpful in such a case.
The generalization of "I feel depressed" is a shared concept that we can basically rely on. We can ask what the depression feels like; 9/10 times I've talked with others, we found much commonality in the experience. So we can self-diagnose ourselves as "depressed", and this generalization, "I have depression", holds up well and is not inaccurate.